Amarok was once my favorite
application. Best audio player ever, on any platform. First signs of
an uncertain future showed a few years ago during a developer meeting
in Holland, following that congress Amarok had a major change
of its user interface. It was hideous and it was a disaster, the
common question was: "what the hell were they smoking over
there?". The mistake was acknowledged and the old interface was
restored quickly. But following in the footsteps of KDE 4
(which as we all know was a major disaster) the developers decided to
release Amarok 2, a complete rewrite of the
application.
Which is today at release 2.0.2 and it's still completely
broken, probably will be until around 2.2 comes out... such a
long time to wait. Remember they didn't have some average product to
build on, they already had the best application out there. Bugs
are numerous, and I don't even care about the big ones such as broken
database import function but the little ones drive me crazy. For
instance working with podcasts for more than a few minutes is bound to
freeze them, it's impossible to expand/retract or do anything else
with them until you restart the whole application. Oh and did I
mention the bug where all your podcasts (which had to be manually
imported remember) would disappear on shutdown. I noticed a lot more
problems, but that's enough - it's unusable, as simple as that. One
thing that fascinates me though - Amarok v1 compiled and packaged on
my system takes up 4MB while Amarok v2 is close
to 14MB. What the hell is in there, for it sure isn't basic
functionality (EQ anyone?).
Six months ago I started searching for a replacement. All
those GTK Amarok clones (Exaile, Banshee,
Rhythmbox...) were not even close to Amarok 1 and I discarded
them. What do I need from my audio player; tagging support, streaming
support (Shoutcast integration is a plus) and podcast
support.
During my search I tried many players, most of them are regarded
as simple audio players, like Audacious
and Sonata. But none had everything I needed, most important
thing being podcast support. I thought about that one a lot, could we
still call them simple if they did have podcast support? It's
such a common thing today, so I believe they should all have it. In
the end I managed to find a true gem, and even though it doesn't have
podcast support (yet) it deserves your attention. This player is
called Goggles Music
Manager and it's a fantastic application. Its interface is
similar to that of Foobar2000 and it has some good
functionality. Most notable thing is that it uses the FOX
toolkit so it's extremely lightweight
and fast.
I actually almost never used Amarok to just play/listen to music. When
I needed to sort my music collection, clean up tags, listen to
radio/podcasts... I would invoke it. But when I just want to play some
music I always use cplay which is a command line audio
player. To be more exact it's a frontend to many audio players and
it's written in Python. Development of cplay is inactive for
some time now, and even its home page disappeared a few months
back. Last released version had a few smaller problems and I also
missed some functionality so I patched it a lot and I plan to release
those patches or even the package as a whole... but that is a story
for
a future
article. In the meantime you can at least check the simple
color
patch.